Birthplace of Memorial Day? That Depends Where You’re From

WATERLOO, N.Y.: OFFICIAL RECOGNITION Col. Lars Braun, who had just returned from 14 months in Iraq, in a Memorial Day parade in 2008 with his daughter, Rachel. In 1966, a presidential proclamation designated the town, in the Finger Lakes area, the official birthplace of Memorial Day.Credit
James Rajotte for The New York Times

COLUMBUS, Ga. — Right on either side of Alabama, there are two places with the same name.

Like the one over in Mississippi, this Columbus was founded in the 1820s and sits just a few minutes from countryside in almost any way you drive.

It does not take much for the historically curious in either town — like Richard Gardiner, a professor of teacher education at Columbus State University here — to explain why theirs is the true originator of a revered American holiday and why the other is well-meaning but simply misguided.

“I’m going to blame Memphis to some degree,” Professor Gardiner said, about which more later.

The custom of strewing flowers on the graves of fallen soldiers has innumerable founders, going back perhaps beyond the horizon of recorded history, perhaps as far as war itself. But there is the ancient practice and there is Memorial Day, the specific holiday, arising from an order for the annual decoration of graves that was delivered in 1868 by Maj. Gen. John A. Logan, the commander in chief of the Grand Army of the Republic, a group made up of Union veterans of the Civil War.

According to the United States Department of Veterans Affairs, roughly two dozen places claim to be the primary source of the holiday, an assertion found on plaques, on Web sites and in the dogged avowals of local historians across the country.

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COLUMBUS, MISS.: A POEM Rufus Ward says “The Blue and the Gray,” published in 1867 in The Atlantic Monthly and inspired by an event here, got things rolling.Credit
Cary Norton for The New York Times

Yet each town seems to have different criteria: whether its ceremony was in fact the earliest to honor Civil War dead, or the first one that General Logan heard about, or the first one that conceived of a national, recurring day.

Waterloo, N.Y., was designated the official birthplace of Memorial Day by presidential proclamation in 1966, and indeed, beginning in May 1866, Waterloo held an annual townwide commemoration.

But women in Boalsburg, Pa., which has a claim as the holiday’s birthplace, began decorating graves each year as early as October 1864. In and around Carbondale, Ill., according to the Jackson County Historical Society, there are two markers making such an assertion in two different cemeteries. James H. Ryan, a retired Army colonel, has descended into the Logan archives and come out with a strong case for the town where he lives, Petersburg, Va.

This — readers, please take note — is just a partial and by no means definitive list.

But the claims of the two Columbuses, eyeing each other across Alabama, are among the more nuanced and possibly the most intertwined.

“I have a good friend from Columbus, Georgia, and we go around and around on this,” said Ken P’Pool, the deputy state historic preservation officer in Mississippi. “This goes back a long, long time.”

Columbus, Miss., was a hospital town, and in many cases a burial site, for both Union and Confederate casualties of Shiloh, brought in by the trainload. And it was in that Columbus where, at the initiation of four women who met in a 12-gabled house on North Fourth Street, a solemn procession was made to Friendship Cemetery on April 25, 1866.

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COLUMBUS, GA.: EXTENSIVE DOCUMENTATION Daniel Bellware, left, and Richard Gardiner at the grave of Mary Ann Williams, whose 1866 letter may have inspired the holiday.Credit
Grant Blankenship for The New York Times

As the story goes, one of the women spontaneously suggested that they decorate the graves of the Union as well as the Confederate dead, as each grave contained someone’s father, brother or son. A lawyer in Ithaca, N.Y., named Francis Miles Finch read about this reconciliatory gesture and wrote a poem about the ceremony in Columbus, “The Blue and the Gray,” which The Atlantic Monthly published in 1867.

“My view is it’s really the poem that inspired the nation,” said Rufus Ward, a retired district attorney, sitting in his basement and sipping a mint julep (his grandmother’s recipe, he said, the one she shared with Eudora Welty).

The Georgians dispute little of this. But they argue that the procession in the other Columbus was actually inspired by the events in their Columbus.

Professor Gardiner has lived here for only a few years, but he has joined with an accountant named Daniel Bellware, an avid history sleuth originally from Detroit, and together they have written an academic paper making the case for Columbus, Ga. They are also considering writing a book. An enthusiastic advocate for their research, Professor Gardiner has also created a one-hour slide presentation filled with archival newspaper articles.

The slide show starts off with a flurry of articles from Northern newspapers in 1868, all attributing the idea of Memorial Day to women in the South. Some were more approving than others.

“The ladies of the South instituted this memorial day,” read The New York Times on June 5, 1868. “They wished to annoy the Yankees; and now the Grand Army of the Republic in retaliation and from no worthier motive, have determined to annoy them by adopting their plan of commemoration.”

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A house in Columbus, Miss., where in 1866 four women decided on a procession to honor the Civil War dead of both sides.Credit
Cary Norton for The New York Times

As for the claim of Columbus, Ga., Professor Gardiner points to a local woman named Mary Ann Williams, who in the spring of 1866 wrote an open letter suggesting “a day be set apart annually” and become a “custom of the country” to decorate the graves of fallen soldiers with flowers.

That day, described as a national day, was chosen to be April 26, the anniversary of Gen. Joseph E. Johnston’s surrender in North Carolina to Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman of the Union Army. The letter, or a summary of it, ran in newspapers all over the South, and as far west as St. Louis and as far north as New Hampshire, leading to widespread ceremonies on that day.

It also ran in the The Memphis Daily Avalanche on March 27, 1866. But the paper had the wrong date — April 25.

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“This misprint right here is the difference between what you’ll hear in Columbus, Mississippi, and here,” Professor Gardiner said, concluding that the Memphis misprint traveled to the other Columbus. The Mississippi commemoration did take place a day earlier, he admitted, but they go too far in claiming they came up with it independently. “I just can’t — I don’t buy it.”

Still, there is this: Mrs. Williams of Georgia envisioned a day honoring only the Confederate dead, a considerably less national vision, which survives in Confederate decoration days in parts of the South.

One of the remarkable things about Memorial Day, said David W. Blight, a professor of history at Yale University, was how it arose in the aftermath of the country’s most savage years, and at the initiation of war widows, former slaves and grateful citizens of vastly divergent political views and even conceptions of what was being commemorated.

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Two Columbuses have rival claims to Memorial Day.Credit
The New York Times

Yet unfortunately, he said, even that most generalized origin is unfamiliar to most Americans.

In his book “Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory,” Professor Blight describes a mostly forgotten — or possibly suppressed — event in Charleston, S.C., in 1865 at a racetrack turned war prison. Black workmen properly reburied the Union dead that were found there, and on May 1, a cemetery dedication was held, attended by thousands of freed blacks who marched in procession around the track.

He has called that the first Memorial Day, as it predated most of the other contenders, though he said he has no evidence that it led to General Logan’s call for a national holiday.

“I’m much more interested in the meaning that’s being conveyed in that incredible ritual than who’s first,” he said.

Nancy Carpenter, the director of the Convention and Visitors Bureau in Columbus, Miss., agreed that the hunt for an origin should not overshadow the day’s meaning. Memorial Day has had a different significance for her since her son Luke left for Iraq after graduating from West Point and led a platoon that she said lost a fifth of its men.

The meaning changed even though the holiday was always central to his life, she said. He graduated on Memorial Day weekend. He got married on Memorial Day weekend. And he even grew up right on North Fourth Street.

To which she added, “And we will always believe that Memorial Day got started on North Fourth Street.”

A version of this article appears in print on May 27, 2012, on Page A16 of the New York edition with the headline: Birthplace of Memorial Day? That Depends Where You’re From. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe